Study of biomimetics applied to logistics, material handling, SCM and manufacturing: A bibliometric analysis (1990-2013)

Abstract

Biomimetics and logistics have been discussed broadly in the scientific literature with regard to their particular discipline. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the amount and structure of the scientific research on the interdisciplinary topic of biomimetics applied to logistics. With this subject area, we performed a query of scientific online databases and conducted a bibliometric analysis to explore the most influential works and their impact on logistics. However, the term bionics was introduced in the late 1960s, and our analysis revealed a marginal scientific attention on the combined topic bionics & logistics until 2003. Nevertheless, the interdisciplinary topic was increasing disproportionately until today in comparison to their particular disciplines. Additionally, the results of our analysis indicate that some fields of logistics benefit a lot from principles of nature (e.g. transport logistics from behavioural biology) while other fields of logistics could not use this potential. Furthermore, our analysis presents a country ranking according to the amount of publications, which is led by China. Finally, contents and findings are briefly discussed to provide an overview of the previous academic research.